Reviving Ophelia

4 Pages 992 Words

Book Summary & Review
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Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of
Adolescent Girls
By Mary Pipher, Ph.D.

Summary:
Astonishingly, more adolescent females are growing up in today’s society only to endure many more hardships than in preceding generations. In her book, Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher attempts to deliver insights into the reasons why adolescent females endure these struggles. The title, Reviving Ophelia, is based on the story of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As a young girl Ophelia is happy and free-spirited. However, as she goes through adolescence she loses herself. She falls in love with Hamlet and allows her world to revolve around him. She lacks inner direction and struggles to please Hamlet and her father, and because of this she is shattered. When Hamlet rejects her because she is an obedient daughter, she is filled with despair. She dresses herself in clothes heavy enough to weigh her down and drowns herself in a stream.
Mary Pipher believes that many confident and strong-willed girls are transformed into sad, angry and confused girls during adolescence just like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. In this book, Pipher, a clinical psychologist, takes an in depth look at adolescent girls and the factors in their lives that lead to behaviors such as depression, eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, experimentation with drugs, and suicide attempts. Pipher shares numerous stories about adolescent females and the struggles they contend with in finding their selves, as well as dealing with the societal pressures that are placed on things such as body image, drugs and alcohol, and sex and violence.
Through the use of case studies, Pipher explores the world of today’s adolescent girls. She believes that the current crises of adolescence—frequent suicide attempts, dropping out of school, running away from home, teenage pregnancies, drug abuse, and a rise in the amount of adolescent girls with eating di...